#MakeItReal Moment Number 9

What Would You Like To See?

Back when I was in college, the glorious years of 1994 – 1998, the battle between search engine giants Yahoo!, Altavista.com, askjeeves.com and Excite.com was in full bloom, and Google was just in its infancy at the end of my college experience. I remember being at home in NJ planning a trip back to college in 1996 and looking at the map of the trip on Yahoo Maps and thinking to myself, and even saying to my parents, “I would happily let Yahoo pay me to drive around the country on every single road so they could have live photos of every turn people need to take.” Since I’ve been convinced that my life has been tapped by “big brother” my whole life, I’ll assume that baby Google heard me say this and that’s why we now have Google Street View (I’m still waiting for my royalty checks for the idea…they’re coming though, I’m sure of it).

Fast forward 20 years to yesterday when I found out that they now have Google Street View where they don’t even have streets:

The above statement of surprise is a link to an article about the process they used to get the Google Video Car into the space station to take the pictures…kind of.

So maybe I won’t be getting that royalty check, but Google is helping me at least learn more about my dream to be an astronaut. I finally get to really see what the inside of the International Space Station looks like and navigate my way through it. That’s a #MakeItReal Moment for me.

MY QUESTION: What would you and your students like to see? Can Google Street View take you there? If not, what would it take to see it? HOW CAN YOU #MAKEITREAL?

What are three ways you could use this moment and moments like it in your classroom to add relevance to a lesson?